Monday, December 12, 2005

Just recently, Microsoft is bragging about its new feature that will be integrated in Windows Vista called the Restart Manager. The guys at Redmond think that this is a significant addition to the new version of Windows.. a big deal.

The Restart Manager is designed to update the operating system without having to do a manual or forced reboot of the machine. This feature is significantly important to servers having a lot of connected clients. With this feature, network administrators would not have to worry about telling the client computers to save your work ang log off the network because the damn server needs to reboot.

Desktop wise, a user may continue working on the machine while doing an automatic update or patch. After an update, the screen will go blank and on again with all your works still there where you left them.

So, the guys at Redmond really are right in saying that this is really an important feature of Windows Vista.. but as far as I know, this feature is already in Linux/Unix since the mid 80s. A feature enjoyed by Linux/Unix users for almost 20 years! And it is only now that Microsoft came to think that it is important!

I have an Ubuntu and SUSE machine running everyday, and I have made a lot of updates without an interruption of a single reboot. I love how this feature works in Linux machines. Will Microsoft catch up to Linux/Unix and make this feature a seamless integration to Vista? A technology perfected by Linux/Unix for almost 20 years.. its about time that Microsoft wake up.